Research in Motion will no longer be an independent company by the end of the first quarter of 2013, says Eric Jackson, manager of Ironfire Capital.

We had Jackson in our offices yesterday to talk about Yahoo, Microsoft, Apple, and RIM. We have the full conversation below as a podcast.

Jackson summed up RIM saying, "It's a bad software company," and they're "not going to change their stripes over night." He added, it has "Bad cofounders, and they're going to drive this company straight into the ground."

The only hope for RIM is that it releases incredible phones running vastly improved software in 2012.

Even if the phones are great, it's an uphill fight. You're looking at a company that will have gone from 50% of the market to 10%, and it will then have to try and bounce back. That's never happened, and Jackson is betting it doesn't happen with RIM.

RIM hasn't given any timeline or details on when the new phones are out, which leads Jackson to believe they're not hitting until the end of 2012.

At that point it will be too late. The company's stock will be on life support, and someone will take out the company in the first quarter of 2013.

Jackson no longer holds any shares of RIM, but he was short the stock for a while.

We start talking about RIM at the 39:47 mark in the clip below. The audio is a little bit buggy coming in and out. We apologize for that, we had some technical issues.